Build New Games

My feline QA team was hard at work batting down digital fireflies while I thought about the threshold of belief. What were the compelling qualities of the system I created that convinced her these targets were real enough to attack?

This technique provides realistic, seemingly "intelligent" behaviors in a wide class of games with very simple and highly reusable code.

This tutorial introduces the core components of the Crafty game engine and walks you through the process of creating a simple adventure game.

Deciding on which game engine to go with can be tough these days. This article explores three popular JavaScript game engines, their pros and cons, and discusses some things to consider when shopping around

If all you need is to calculate when a couple of rectangles overlap, it’s not a big deal, but for games that involve lots of irregularly shaped sprites moving and reacting to each other realistically, you’ll want to use an industrial strength tool to get the job done.

This article will guide you through the essential physics of game engines. My goal is to point you in the right direction and teach the concepts that you’ll need to build upon later. The next step is up to you. I hope you’ll use this article as a springboard and go write your own game engine, researching advanced concepts in the process.

Recently, I released Empty Black, my 2D shooter/puzzler/platformer. In this article, I’ll describe how I made the player movement deft and intuitive. My general approach was to change something, then try it out. I took the ideas for adjustments from several sources.

This article focuses on two approaches to broad phase detection of collisions. The first is a brute force method that, while simple, quickly becomes wildly inefficient at typical game entity counts. The second is a form of spatial partitioning called a spatial grid. It is relatively simple, yet handles large numbers of game entities efficiently.

In this article we will take a look at three popular Javascript physics libraries and one that is currently in development: box2dweb, Ammo.js, JigLibJS, and Cannon.js. For each one, a quick introduction will be given and then the library will be rated based on ease of use, performance, and feature set.